Thomas Lahusen – författare

Socialist Realism without Shores offers an international perspective on the aesthetics of socialist realism-an aesthetic that, contrary to expectations, survived the death of its originators and the demise of its original domain. This expanded edition of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly brings together scholars from various parts of the globe to discuss socialist realism as it appears across genres in art, architecture, film, and literature and across geographic divides-from the "center," Russia, to various points at the "periphery"-China, Germany, France, Poland, remote republics of the former USSR, and the United States.The contributors here argue that socialist realism has never been a monolithic art form. Essays demonstrate, among other things, that its literature could accommodate psychoanalytic criticism; that its art and architecture could affect the aesthetic dictates of Moscow that made "Soviet" art paradoxically heterogeneous; and that its aesthetics could accommodate both high art and crafted kitsch. Socialist Realism without Shores also addresses the critical discourse provoked by socialist realism-Stalinist aesthetics, "anthropological" readings; ideology critique and censorship; and the sublimely ironic approaches adapted from sots art, the Soviet version of postmodernism.Contributors. Antoine Baudin, Svetlana Boym, Greg Castillo, Katerina Clark, Evgeny Dobrenko, Boris Groys, Hans GÜnther, Julia Hell, Leonid Heller, Mikhail Iampolski, Thomas Lahusen, RÉgine Robin, Yuri Slezkine, Lily Wiatrowski Phillips, Xudong Zhang, Sergei Zimovets

The “Soviet literary cosmopolis” is the name of an approach that provokes and challenges both the more traditional approaches to world literature and seeks to go beyond the approaches of postcolonial studies by, on the one hand, taking into account imperial continuities beyond political ruptures (the October Revolution, Stalinism, post-Stalinism) and, on the other hand, identifying actors in literature beyond the boundaries between official and “uncensored” literature that have been set in stone in previous research.The contributions highlight two distinct and yet interconnected trajectories of the ‘Soviet Project for World Literature’: the internal of the “Soviet multinational literature” and the international one, with adaptation, translation, and the implementation of Socialist Realist aesthetics being some of the central strategies for its realization. The combination of case studies on the implementation of the project in Armenian, Georgian, Kyrgyz, Kazakhstani, and Ukrainian literary contexts with analyses of African, American, and East European cases allows the volume to demonstrate how in a period of roughly fifty years, the Soviet State was creating – by means of literature – a new ‘World’ that stood in sharp contrast to and was envisaged as a viable alternative to its Western counterpart, a decidedly Eurocentric and capitalist ‘World’ concept.